Recently the topic of "expertise" has floated into my consciousness. Serendipitously, a yoga newsletter sent a quote my way today on this subject, coincidentally also a man I have recently been interested in -- Aristotle. "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."
On the way back from our most wonderful week of wedding festivities, I popped in some old hiphop music and the words "If you ain't got a skill or trade, shut the hell up" by Del came up. This got me musing whether I could develop a skill or trade, and then I got into the realm of how I might become an expert at that.
OF course, knowing the answers are always within me, on my lunch jog I started to contemplate pronation versus supination, the old running shoe dichotomy, and my mind related this to Paul Grilley's external/internal rotation of the femur dictating what we can or cannot do in yoga. Suddenly it occured to me, I might be an expert in jogging. With well over 10 years of experience, little to no ambition to make this a extrinsic achievement for myself (my racing days ended long ago seeing how it ruined the intrinsic value I felt), and loving jogging as though it could save my life, I realized I could say with full confidence that I am a jogging expert. Huh.
So if you want to learn to jog, and clearly I am not going to help anyone run a marathon, well, I'm one of the people who could help. And I do, I have a long-standing record of having each ex-boyfriend run a marathon, including my husband, but more in my style, he did a fun-run that was a half marathon distance. For this low-achieving, jogging girl, this was more acceptable:)
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